Tuesday, January 10, 2012

When the Right to Resist Becomes the "Duty to Submit"

Anne Dekins was a loud-mouthed party girl -- or at least, that's what the arrest warrant suggested. Whatever she may have
done in the past, Miss Dekins was quietly minding her own business when Officer
Samuel Bray found her on the street and began to haul her away.

Dekins wasn’t inclined to go
quietly, and she put up a struggle. Her cries for help attracted the interest
of several armed men led by an individual named Tooley, who confronted Bray and
demanded to know what he was doing to the frantic woman. The officer produced
his official credentials and insisted that he was making a lawful arrest for
“disorderly conduct.” When witnesses disputed that description, Bray called for
backup.

Tooley and his associates
ordered Bray to release the woman, and then took action to enforce that lawful order.
After Bray’s partner was killed in the ensuing struggle, Tooley and his
associates were arrested for murder. The trial court threw out the murder
charge, ruling that the warrant was defective. Since the arrest was illegal,
the court pointed out, Dekins had a right to resist – and bystanders likewise
had a right, if not a positive duty, to assist her. The defendants were eventually
found guilty of manslaughter, but quickly pardoned and set free.

By trying to enforce an invalid
warrant, Bray “did not act as a constable, but a common oppressor,” observed
the trial court. Tooley and the other bystanders were properly “provoked” by
the act of aggressive violence against Anne Dekins, and their forceful but
measured response – first demanding that the abductor release the hostage, then
exercising defensive force to free her – was entirely appropriate.

Lawless violence against the
helpless “is a sufficient provocation to all people out of compassion” in any
circumstance, observed the court, “much more where it is done under a colour of
justice, and where the liberty of the subject is invaded….” In fact, an act of
that kind carried out by a law enforcement official is nothing less than “a
provocation to all the subjects of England.”

Every Englishman “ought to be
concerned for Magna Charta and the laws,” concluded the Queen’s Bench in
the 1710 case Queen v. Tooley.
“And if any one against the law imprison a man, he is an offender against Magna
Charta.”

Roughly forty years earlier, the
same court had issued a similar opinion in Hopkin
Huggett’s Case. Huggett and his friends had come to the aid of a man
who had been arrested by a constable named Berry. Huggett demanded to see the
arrest warrant. When Berry produced a clearly spurious document, Huggett drew
his sword and demanded the prisoner’s release. Berry refused, and finished
second in the ensuing swordfight.

The wrongfully arrested man in
that case (who was threatened with impressment into the military) did nothing
to resist his abduction. It wasn’t clear that Huggett knew the man, or had even
met him prior to the incident. Yet the Queen’s Bench ruled that Huggett’s
actions were justified, since a situation in which a “man [is] unduly arrested
or restrained of his liberty … is a provocation to all other men of England,
not only his friends but strangers also[,] for common humanity’s sake.”

In addition to codifying the
Common Law right to resist arrest, Hopkin
Huggett’s Case and Queen v. Tooley recognized that this right inheres
not only in the victim, but in citizens who interpose on the victim’s behalf.

Simply put: When a police
officer commits the crime of unlawful arrest, the citizens who intervene are
acting as peace officers entitled to employ any necessary means –
including lethal force – to liberate the victim.

In early 18th
Century England, this was seen as a
non-negotiable bulwark against what the heroic Algernon Sidney called “the
violence of a wicked magistrate who, hav[ing] armed a crew of lewd villains,”
would otherwise inflict his will on innocent and helpless people with impunity.
Sidney’s martyrdom at the hands of precisely that kind of degenerate,
tyrannical magistrate underscored the vitality of the principle he expressed.

“The right to resist unlawful arrest
memorializes one of the principal elements in the heritage of the English
revolution: the belief that the will to resist arbitrary authority in a
reasonable way is valuable and ought not to be suppressed by the criminal law,”
observed Paul Chevigny in a 1969 Yale Law
Journal essay. Actually, Chevigny – like many others – elides a critical
distinction between “power” and “authority”: While a police officer may have
the power to abduct or abuse an
innocent person, citizens have the authority
to prevent that crime.

Until the late 1960s, most
states recognized – albeit grudgingly -- the Common Law right to resist arrest.
By 1969, that right had been transmuted, through judicial activism, into a
revocable “privilege” – one that had to be dispensed with to serve the interests of the State's punitive caste.

“The weight of authoritative
precedent supports a right to repel an unlawful arrest with force…. This was
the rule at common law,” admitted the Alaska State Supreme Court in a seminal
work of sophistry called TerryGlenn Miller v. State of Alaska. “It
was based on the proposition that everyone should be privileged to use
reasonable force to prevent an unlawful invasion of his physical integrity and
personal liberty.”

That admission clearly
anticipated the familiar use of the magical conjunction “but” as a rhetorical
reset button, and the Court didn’t disappoint:

“But certain imperfections in
the functioning of the rule have brought about changes in some jurisdictions. A
new principle of right conduct has been espoused” – by whom, the Court didn’t
specify. “It is argued” – once again, the parties to that argument were not
identified – “that if a peace officer is making an illegal arrest but is not
using force” – something that could not occur, given that an arrest, by strict
definition, is an act of armed coercion – “the remedy of the citizen should be
that of suing the officer for false arrest, not resistance with force.”

“The control of man’s
destructive and aggressive impulses is one of the great unsolved problems of
our society,” pontificated the Court as it destroyed one of the few effective
checks on the deadliest manifestation of those impulses. “Our rules of law
should discourage the unnecessary use of physical force between man and man.
Any rule which promotes rather than inhibits violence should be re-examined.”
That objective is not legitimately served by granting State functionaries an unqualified license
to commit criminal violence against the innocent.

Four years after the Miller decision, a decision entitled Richardson
v. Idaho emerged from the Idaho State Supreme Court’s emunctory
aperture. John Richardson had been convicted of resisting arrest through
violence and sentenced to five years in prison. The incident in which the
supposed crime occurred took place at a restaurant in Idaho Falls. Richardson
and his ex-wife, who were having dinner, got into an argument, and were asked
to leave when the latter became loud and profane.

Two off-duty police officers
escorted them outside, and then tried to arrest Richardson for “disorderly
conduct” after he became annoyed by their unwarranted intrusion. Richardson
kicked one of the uniformed buttinskis in the mouth, and managed to grab one of
their pistols, which he fired into the air, rather than at his assailants (as
he was entitled to, both morally and – under the Supreme Court’s still-valid 1900 Bad Elk precedent – legally).

Prominently
citing the Miller decision in Alaska,
the Idaho Court observed that “More than one state has, without legislative
action, modified the traditional common law rule and has adopted the rule that
a private citizen may not use force to resist a peaceful arrest,” blithely
ignoring, once again, the fact that a “peaceful arrest” is a creature more
fanciful than a left-handed unicorn that speaks Norwegian. “We are of the
opinion that the trend is, and should be, away from the traditional common law
rule, and therefore we hold that if a person has reasonable ground to believe
he is being arrested by a peace officer, it is his duty to refrain from using
force or any weapon in resisting arrest regardless of whether or not there is a
legal basis for the arrest.”

The key holding in the
Richardson ruling has been enshrined in the Idaho Code Judicial Instructions
(ICJI 1262), which asserts that “it is the person’s duty to refrain from using
force or any weapon in resisting arrest regardless of whether or not there is a
legal basis for the arrest.” The obverse of this spurious “Duty to Submit to
Arrest” is a police officer’s privilege to commit criminal acts for the purpose
of nullifying the Exclusionary Rule – something the Idaho Supreme Court
acknowledged in a 2008 ruling captioned State v.
Lusby.

Police paid a visit to Lusby’s
apartment to investigate a disturbance. She quickly grew tired of the uninvited
company – what decent person wouldn’t? – and went into her apartment, closing
the door behind her. One of the officers committed an act of criminal trespass
and announced that Lusby was under arrest for “obstruction” and “resistance.” At
one point the bully caught an elbow in the face from the victim, a small down-payment
on what he deserved – but enough to earn Lusby a charge of felonious assault on
an officer. She was also charged with drug possession on the basis of evidence
found in the officer’s illegal search.

Because that search was patently
illegal, the trial court granted a motion to dismiss all charges against Lusby.
The State Supreme Court admitted that this was the case – but insisted that Lusby’s resistance to the illegal invasion of her
home retroactively legalized the unconstitutional search.

“It appears to be a nearly
universal rule in American jurisdictions that when a suspect responds to an
unconstitutional search or seizure by a physical attack on the officer,
evidence of this new crime is admissible notwithstanding the prior illegality,”
decreed the court, extracting that “rule” from precisely the same orifice from
which the Richardson ruling
originated. “The rationale … [is that] a subsequent attack on the officer is a
new crime unrelated to any prior illegality…. Accordingly, we hold that
evidence of Lusby’s alleged batter on an officer or other forceful resistance
is not suppressible … [and] evidence of paraphernalia found in the search
incident to Lusby’s arrest [is] admissible.”

On this construction, a police
officer can nullify the Fourth Amendment anytime he pleases, simply by claiming
that the victim committed the supposed crime of resisting. This can take the
form of assuming an “aggressive posture,” such as “blading” the body or even
putting one foot in front of the other in what can be construed as an “attack
stance.” Or, as the recent assault on Austin, Texas resident Antonio Buehler
demonstrates, the “assault” can be nothing more than breathing in the face of a
police officer.

To Buehler and his friends, the
spectacle looked more like a gang assault.

"We hear a loud scream, and
we look over, and we see the cop violently yanking the female out of the car
onto the ground," Buehler told local ABC affiliate KVUE. "She is screaming. The other cop
ran up and they both sort of grabbed her arms. Her hands were behind her back
straight out and they lifted her up by her arms. It looked extremely
painful."

With the help of a friend,
Buehler began to document this act of "street justice" with his cell
phone. That prompted Oborski to confront Buehler, who was not interfering in
any way.

According to Buehler, Oborski
barked, "What the hell are you taking pictures for?"

"My response was, `I am
allowed to. Public official in a public place.'"

As he was trained to, Oborski started to lie in an effort to devise a cover charge against Buehler.
First he claimed that Buehler was somehow "interfering with the investigation,"
which was patently untrue. Then the cop assaulted Buhler by pushing the
unresisting man — who would have been more than a match for the donut-grazer,
had he chosen to fight back — up against a truck.

"Once he had me pinned up
against the back of the truck he kept leaning in," Buehler continued.
"He kept pushing me."

Eventually Oborski got so close
that Buehler actually breathed on him — which gave him a pretext to accuse the
witness of "spitting" on him. With some difficulty, and Snider’s help,
Oborski wrestled Buehler (who offered only passive resistance) to the ground
and handcuffed him. The cops took Beuhler to a BAT van—- a patently unreliable mobile alcohol testing unit — in the hope of documenting that the
witness was intoxicated, which he wasn't. The cop finally settled on charging
him with "harassing a public servant" — a third-degree felony — and
"resisting arrest."

As is always the case in
incidents of this kind, Buehler wasn’t arrested for an actual crime; he
was vindictively punished for “contempt of cop.”

“You don’t f*** with cops,” Oborski snarled at Buehler. “You
don’t get in our f***ing way. You don’t question us, and we’re going to teach
you a lesson.”

Norma Pizana’s plight was strikingly similar to that of Anne
Dekins, with at least one critical difference: Dekins and her rescuers were blessed
to live in 18th Century England, a relatively civilized society that
recognized and protected a free individual’s indispensable right to resist
State-licensed criminal violence.

Acknowledgements and Updates

Once again, thanks to everyone who has donated so generously. This really means a great deal to me and my family.

Among the reasons why my activity here at Pro Libertate has tapered off somewhat is the fact that I've been very busy curating the blog at Republic magazine. Check out the website and, if you're interested, sign up for a free digital subscription.

Some of you are aware that my wonderful wife Korrin has been hospitalized several times since 2006. She's in the hospital again. I would appreciate prayers on her behalf from those of you so inclined. Thank you.

35 comments:

Jerri Lynn Ward
said...

Norma was the passenger and all she did was tell her friend (who was the subject of the DWI stop) to refuse the breathalyzer. For that, the cops yanked her out of the car, performed the same maneuver that a Border Patrol Agent is serving 2 years in the federal pen did to a detainee, and was hit with public intoxication charge.

The problem is people of the usA are unknowingly and by deception now subject to Corporate Law (a.k.a. Law of the Sea, Commercial law, UCC law, "privileges" to be issued and taken away by tyrants and other assorted criminals) - man-made law. Enforcers, in form of violence-threatening "police" are needed to make this law happen -as it is contrary to human nature

They also do not understand or know (thanks to the corporate-fascist "education" system which renders them nearly useless) that a higher law exists - Common Law (a.k.a. Unalienable Rights, Law of the Land, rights human beings are born with and can not be taken away by any human) - God-given law. Peace Officers do not need to enforce such law as it respects human nature. They only need to remove any person who does not respect others' rights - by non-violent means. For example - Peace Officers may surround violent corporate revenue collectors to prevent them from doing violence to any person.

Common law still exists and it trumps all man-made laws - including Corporate Law. It is this law that makes The People The only legit Government authorized and gives every person equal opportunity to self-defense against any and all tyrants, big ("feds) or small (local corporate revenue collectors and enforcers-by violent-force (i.e. state-sponsored terrorism), who are misidentified as "police officers").

It is Common Law, the Law of the Land that gives people the right to form Peace Officer associations, Militias, to self defend, and to stop out-of-control dangerous thugs from attacking us.

Peace Officer associations can form and provide true protection to their communities using peaceful means. Example - instead of robbery (fines) under threat of violent force, beatings, outright murder (i.e. state sponsored terrorism) as the corporate revenue collectors think they can continue to get away with, Peace Officers could handle drunk driving by simply offering the offending parties a peaceful solution: they can leave their car parked, call friend, family, a taxi, sleep in their car until sober, etc.

Further more - people must start taking their main duty seriously - that is The PEOPLE ARE THE GOVERNMENT; the posers in DC, state, local positions of temporary and limited authority are the PUBLIC SERVANTS who can and must be removed without hesitation the moment they attempt to act otherwise (e.g. the violent criminals posing as police officers).

Time to form Committees of Safety and remove the poser "government" entities and particularly the corporate revenue collectors who are now nothing but state-sponsored terrorists.

This can be accomplished with little to no offensive violence (self defence, by all necessary means, of property and community is exercised as a right -always- not a privilege).

People simply have to decide that they will retake their governing duties back from the Corporate thugs and bandits (as they have proven beyond all doubts that they The people must just decide they can not be trusted with our welfare) restrict the Law of the Sea to commerce only and re-establish - in full - the Common Laws of the land - Unalienable rights of all human beings.

And 18th century England is the place that was oppressive enough that the Founders fought a revolution to get away from it!

Man, how in only two hundred some years, this country has degenerated from that, to the oppressive, totalitarian dystopia it is today. It truly makes me sick to my stomach; and ashamed of the enabling, sycophantic trash I'm stuck sharing planet with.

O-kay, so I live in Nazi Germany.It's quite clear, I get it.It's even worse than that.Thanks for illuminating things.Evil thrives with our neighbors support.They like it like that.I feel sorry for them.

Will, you wrote ,“On this construction, a police officer can nullify the Fourth Amendment anytime he pleases, simply by claiming that the victim committed the supposed crime of resisting.”

I think Scalia (who believes the Fourth Amendment does not explicitly impose the requirement of a warrant anyway) has admitted that. In California v. Acevedo, 500 U.S. 565, (1991), he wrote (happily) that “Even before today’s decision, the ‘warrant requirement’ had become so riddled with exceptions that it was basically unrecognizable. In 1985, one commentator cataloged nearly 20 such exceptions.”

He continues, quite sarcastically, I think, “Our intricate body of ‘law’ regarding ‘reasonable expectation of privacy’ has been developed largely as a means of creating these exceptions, enabling a search to be denominated not a Fourth amendment “search,” and therefore not subject to the general warrant requirement.

There can be no clarity in this area unless we make up our minds, and unless the principles we express comport with the actions we take.”

So, until they make up their minds, just do your duty and languish for decades in prison. Scalia loves the drug war and hates the Exclusionary “Rule” because he says it unleashes violent criminals (pot smokers) on society.

(BTW, calling the Fourth Amendment the Fourth Amendment is SO yesterday. It is now officially “the right to privacy.”)

NDAA @6:16 p.m. said, Anne is an enemy of the state and will be dealt with accordingly. Since there is no other Anne mentioned in the post but Anne Dekins, I assume you mean her.

If Anne were 20 at the time of the "incident" and the case of Queen v. Tooley took place in 1710, Anne would be at least 282 years old today, which is about how long it takes the police to solve a murder or find a missing person.

Anon @10:03 pm: What exactly are you talking about? If you're saying what I think you're saying, then I agree with you completely. However, if I've misunderstood your post, in the words of Rosanne Rosanna Danna of SNL, "never mind." I am curious, though.

You can post this to facebook, just not as a link. Just click the little X next to think link portion of the share box and leave the url as plain text, sure it isn't as convenient - people will have to copy and paste the url - but at least you can spread the message.

Please read about my police encounters with a search for "New police weapon against homeless" on homeless forums and "Historic coverup of FBI and police crimes currently taking place" on the Urban 75 message board. Please share these threads with anyone you know who believes in civil liberties. Then try to get any media to begin telling the story. Bill Anderson soxin8@hotmail.com

Anon @11:07 AM: Thanks for the info; I did a search on "New Police weapon against homeless, (https://www.google.com/search?q=%22New+police+weapon+against+homeless&rlz=1I7GGLD_en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7), but I haven't read it yet. I can't find anything about the police on Urban 75; can you give us the site?

STANFORD, Calif.--President Obama is planning to hand the U.S. Commerce Department authority over a forthcoming cybersecurity effort to create an Internet ID for Americans, a White House official said here today.

It's "the absolute perfect spot in the U.S. government" to centralize efforts toward creating an "identity ecosystem" for the Internet, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Howard Schmidt said.

That news, first reported by CNET, effectively pushes the department to the forefront of the issue, beating out other potential candidates, including the National Security Agency and the Department of Homeland Security. The move also is likely to please privacy and civil-liberties groups that have raised concerns in the past over the dual roles of police and intelligence agencies.

The announcement came at an event today at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, where U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Schmidt spoke.

The Obama administration is currently drafting what it's calling the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, which Locke said will be released by the president in the next few months. (An early version was publicly released last summer.)

“But certain imperfections in the functioning of the [common law] rule have brought about changes in some jurisdictions. A new principle of right conduct has been espoused”… “that if a peace officer is making an illegal arrest but is not using force”… “the remedy of the citizen should be that of suing the officer for false arrest, not resistance with force.”

If you have the means to “sue a cop” for false arrest, what fresh hell will this incur? From what I’ve read, this “remedy” may take years of your life and drain your life savings and the outcome will probably not go in your favor.

In 106 Fourth Amendment cases, the words “Fourth Amendment” are used 3,440 times, while the phrases “Privacy,” “right to/of privacy” and “expectation of privacy” are used 3,345 times, a difference of five. Even if your Fourth Amendment “right” has been violated, it won’t matter, should the Court determine that you had no “expectation of privacy,” which the court itself determines on a case by case basis. The Fourth Amendment is good and solid; this stuff is crap.

The term “good faith” is used 90 times in these opinions, and “bad faith” is used nine times, and both terms apply only to cops. So, if you sue a cop for false arrest, it won’t matter if the cop acted in “good faith” OR “bad faith”; the result may be the same:

The upshot was that the officers in good faith believed Miller was Hill and arrested him. They were quite wrong as it turned out, and subjective good-faith belief would not in itself justify either the arrest or the subsequent search.But sufficient probability, not certainty, is the touchstone of reasonableness under the Fourth amendment, and, on the record before us, the officers’ mistake was understandable and the arrest a reasonable response to the situation facing them at the time. (Most people cannot grasp the horror of certain crimes unless it happens to them, like kidnapping. People see you are now free, alive and unhurt, so what’s the big deal? It is a huge deal, especially official kidnapping.)

The cops, under the terms good faith/bad faith, are held to no standard whatsoever and are not even required to know the law. You, on the other hand, must know every law; otherwise, you could use the “good faith” defense, but you can’t. “Ignorance of the law is no defense” applies to people, but not to cops.

So this “remedy” starts off with this premise: “the Government’s knowing and purposeful bad faith hostility to any person’s fundamental constitutional rights.”

Yossarian, the obvious conclusion, and we're pretty much preaching to the choir around here, is that our black robed overlords by and large side with their storm troopers and fellow travelers, to protect themselves to line their pockets. With a straight tax-fattened face no less.

The law review article linked in your column, Resisting Unlawful Arrest in Mississippi:Resisting the Modern Trend by Craig Hemmens,strikes me as a-typical of backward statist reasoning which serves only to obfuscate the true issues being examined.

Mr. Hemmens appears at first glance to be a proponent of the common law right to resist an unlawful arrest, yet his article digresses into the age old conundrum of Southern rebellion rather than focusing on the true question of Northern incitement.

In questioning the demise of the common law of liberty on any level, from the right of secession down to the right to resist unlawful arrest, it is typical of the statist mindset to focus attention on those who dissent rather than on those who are the proximate cause of the violence done to our liberties in the first instance.

Rather than produce a useful treatise on Northern society's historical and energetic effort to undermine and discard hundreds of years of common law and hard won liberty, the article chooses instead to focus on a time worn straw-man: "Southern subculture of violence."

As a Southerner myself, let me give you the definitive diagnosis of the "Southern subculture of violence." In a word, it is called "blowback."

Why is it a mystery that we Southrons choose to retain the common law as was handed down to us over hundreds and hundreds of years? Isn't the true mystery a question of why, as in so many other instances, the Northern establishment is so willing to discard the common law rather than advance it?

What I would have liked to have read in Mr. Hemmens' article is an explanation of the Northern subculture of violence that continues to undermine and destroy our historical progress toward a free and liberal society.

I just noticed this. That Oborski cat has his picture taken in front of a MADD banner with flyers. As if by inference he's saving the public by putting those BAD people who drink into the klink! Coincidence? Not hardly. Cynical media manipulation.

From Hemmen’s article: The right to resist an unlawful arrest has existed, in some form, at common law for over 300 years. Its origins may be traced to the Magna Charta in 1215, but it was not until The Queen v. Tooley that the right was clearly established by judicial decision.

Whether the right existed for 300 years or 795 years (dating from the Magna Charta from which it was "traced,") it seems clear that during those years, the police were considered as nothing more than other citizens. They could no more kidnap anyone or commit home invasions than you or I could. I guess it took Americans to exalt them to little gods, who can do whatever they want with absolute impunity.

The two sites I checked showed the first ten states with the highest homicide rates split North/South 50–50. These sites also showed the states with the highest homicide rates had the largest population of African–Americans; the states with the lowest homicide rates had the largest population of whites. So why wasn’t their “study” called the “African–American subculture of violence”? Well (1), you just can’t say that, (2), their hatred of the white south, and (3), they would have to admit the truth that most African–American violence is the fault of the government, such as their Ridiculous but Beloved Drug War. Stop the Drug War, and probably half the imprisoned Blacks will be released.

The South has historically had a higher level of interpersonal violence than other regions; possible explanations for this include social disorganization, economic deprivation, [all caused by the government], an adverse reaction to losing the Civil War, and unusually strong support for the right of the individual to defend their (sic) honor.

The Civil War is mentioned three times because white southern hatred is all they think about. What other group besides white Southerners can you call sister f**king, ni**er hanging, inbred porch monkeys? Only the Germans can be talked to or written about with such hatred.

But Southern white hatred didn’t start with the war. This is from a letter from T. Jefferson to John Taylor, June, 1798, 63 years before the Civil War:

It is true that we are completely under the saddle of Massachusetts and Connecticut, and that they ride us very hard, cruelly insulting our feelings, as well as exhausting our strength and subsistence.… If to rid ourselves of the present rule of Massachusetts and Connecticut, we break the Union, will the evil stop there? The "evil", Tom? You're such an idiot.

The right to resist arrest exists in the common law but is being removed from the codified law. This is easy to explain: the common law is of the people whereas the codified law is of the legislature and executive. Guess who the police answer to? Certainly not the people. This is happening in every area of our law; the common law is being subverted by our legislatures through codification which accomplishes 2 goals: 1) it halts the refinement of the common law by etching it in stone. 2) it places the law into the exclusive purview of the legislature and executive thus confiscating it from the people. In essence, we are creating a new Napoleonic Code which at least one State, Louisiana, languishes under already. To change the law, you have to move the congress to do so. Anglo-Saxon law has recognized for centuries the advantages of non-codified law, the best advantages being that it is malleable and in the hands of the people.

Excellent reasoning! Have you ever done any research on what is behind this drive for Uniform Codes to be enacted in every state? I haven't, but I suspect that such research would reveal something alarming.

True sovereignty lies with whomever writes the law.The common law gave sovereignty to the people intheir ability to mold the law to their needs.Judges only interpret the law, they don't write it.If you want to rule a people, you have to get a monopoly on writing the laws they live under.It's that simple.Codifying the law gives the legislative/executivebranch a monopoly on the law. What better wayto rule and control? Codified law is also much mucheasier to learn because it is "black letter law" ratherthan contained in hundreds of years of case law.This is the fatal attraction to students and younglawyers. It's much easier to learn, but changing itis next to impossible because you have to getcontrol of congress. The common law is what setthe Anglo-Saxon world apart from the legalistsin Europe that lived under the Napoleonic and Roman codes that stifle social development and ofcourse, liberty.

June 14, 1789 – My mind revolts, in many instances, against the Constitution of the United States. Indeed, I am afraid it will turn out the vilest of all traps that ever was set to ensnare the freedom of an unsuspecting people. Treaties formed by the Executive of the United States are to be the law of the land. To cloak the Executive with legislative authority is setting aside our modern and much-boasted distribution of power into legislative, judicial, and executive – discoveries unknown to Locke and Montesquieu, and all the ancient writers. It certainly contradicts all the modern theory of government,and in practice must be tyranny.

This is from February 14, 1791:

The system laid down by these gentlemen was avowedly as follows, or, rather, the development of the designs of a certain party:

The general power to carry the Constitution into effect by a constructive interpretation would extend to every case that Congress may deem necessary or expedient. Should the very worst thing supposable happen, viz., the claim of any of the States to any of the powers exercised by the General Government, such claim will be treated with contempt. The laws of the United States will be held paramount to all their laws, claims, and even Constitutions. The supreme power is with the General Government to decide in this, as in everything else, for the States have neglected to secure any umpire or mode of decision in case of the differences between them. Nor is there any point in the Constitution for them to rally under. They may give an opinion, but the opinion of the General Government must prevail, etc. This open point, this unguarded pass, has rendered the General Government completely uncontrollable. With a fleet and army, which the first war must give us, all the future will be chimerical.

Hey Will, thought you might enjoy this article about Indiana allowing citizens to shoot officers for "legalized" home invasions. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/06/05/MN9Q1OT281.DTL) About time someone got it right.

Indeed we've become the very monster we fought to free ourselves from. What I fear I fear though, is that we are engulfed in a struggle with a darker, more tyrannical monster. Interesting to look at what happened when England imposed a 3% tea tax, yet... What taxes do I pay everyday just to live.

I love everything you have shared except, respectfully, the last paragraph about the 4th amendment. On the contrary, I think now is the time, more so than ever, to keep the Amendments at the front of our minds and the edge of our lips. Let us not forget our constitution, to be replaced with modern slang. Let it solidify in our hearts and It will resonate in our actions. And then methinks, we will have our country again.

I noticed the cops who were serving and protecting neglected to get the supposedly drunk driver out of the busy street. Poor thing just stood there in the traffic, likely too scared to move to safety. However, they sure stopped the young man from recording the violent aggression of the cops.